Public Health England lost track of almost 16,000 positive COVID tests in the fall of 2020. Not to a hack, but to a spreadsheet. Lab results were going into Excel templates saved in the old XLS format, which can only hold about 65,000 rows, and when a template ran out of room the new cases just didn’t get added. It took about a week for anyone to notice.
Your store probably isn’t dealing with anything that serious. But a lot of merchants still manage products the same basic way: export a CSV, clean it up in Excel or Google Sheets, upload it again, and hope nothing weird happens in between. While spreadsheets are great for planning and financial reporting, using them as your live inventory backend gets exponentially riskier the larger your catalog grows. This article looks at how leading ecommerce companies approach product data management once a catalog outgrows that routine, and why it gets riskier the bigger the store gets.
Spreadsheets Change Your Data Without Asking
Excel has a habit of “helping.” Type 00123 into a cell and you’ll get 123. Paste a long string of digits and it might turn into 1.23E+15. Microsoft says so in its own help docs, and adds that once a number hits 16 digits, anything past the 15th gets rounded down to zero.
That matters if you sell anything with a barcode. Lots of UPCs start with a zero. Some supplier codes are long. Open the file, save it, upload it, and you may not have the same numbers you started with. Shopify won’t warn you, because from its side the file looks perfectly fine.
(There’s a setting to turn this off in Excel for Microsoft 365 and Excel 2024. It’s off by default, so most people never touch it.)
Genetics researchers have fought this for years. A 2016 study in Genome Biology dug through supplementary Excel files in major genomics journals and found that roughly one in five papers with gene lists had names Excel had turned into dates or numbers. The fix didn’t come from Microsoft. The HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee renamed 27 human genes instead, so MARCH1 is MARCHF1 now and SEPT1 is SEPTIN1. Scientists literally renamed genes to get Excel to stop messing with them. Your SKUs aren’t getting that kind of treatment.
File Size Limits Hit Faster Than Expected
Shopify caps product CSVs at 15 MB. Sounds like a lot. It isn’t, once you’ve got a few thousand products with variants and long HTML descriptions.
So people split the file up, which is what Shopify’s own support staff have suggested. Big uploads can take hours or days, they said, and they’re more likely to fail or get stuck. Smaller batches are safer. They’re also more files to keep straight, and if one of them is a version behind, good luck figuring out which.
Blank Cells Wipe Out Good Data
This one gets even people who’ve been doing imports forever. If you upload a CSV to Shopify with “Overwrite products with matching handles” turned on, a blank optional column doesn’t get skipped. Shopify clears that field. Its docs also point out that including a Variant SKU column without the Option1 Name and Option1 Value columns deletes the variant option.
So the risk runs both ways. Bad info can go in, sure, but good info can also disappear because someone deleted a column that looked useless, or sorted one column and not the others. The spreadsheet doesn’t know what your product page needs. It only knows what’s in the cells.
Spreadsheets Are Full Of Small Mistakes Anyway
Raymond Panko, a University of Hawaii professor, spent years studying spreadsheet errors. Looking at audits of real business spreadsheets, he found that the more careful recent ones turned up mistakes in at least 86% of the files. Around 1% to 2.5% of cells had errors in the studies he cited. That’s pretty much normal for people doing detailed manual work.
He was looking at financial models, not product catalogs, so don’t take those numbers too literally here. The point still stands. People slip up at a steady rate, and more cells means more slip-ups.
Copying and pasting between files is where a lot of them happen. When JPMorgan dug into its 2012 “London Whale” losses, an internal task force found a key risk model had been run through spreadsheets filled in by hand, by a process of copying and pasting data from one spreadsheet to another. One formula used a sum where it should’ve used an average. According to the report, that probably made the risk look about half as volatile as it actually was.
Stop Moving The Data Around
Stores that keep big catalogs under control mostly quit the back-and-forth. They edit products right in the store and double-check before anything goes live. Fewer copies, fewer surprises.
That’s the idea behind Scrub Search & Replace. It works on Shopify and BigCommerce and lets you bulk edit specific fields without exporting or importing anything. It handles regex if your search rules get complicated, and you can look over the changes before they’re applied. If a supplier renames a fabric, or the shipping line on every listing is out of date, you change that text and leave prices and SKUs alone.
Keep your spreadsheets for planning, reporting, and the occasional migration. They’re good at that. Just don’t let one turn into the place your live catalog lives.
Before You Pick A Bulk Editor
Some “bulk editors” are really just the CSV process with a nicer screen on top. Find out whether the tool edits your products in place or still exports and re-imports behind the scenes.
Also check whether you can preview changes before they’re saved, and whether you can lock an edit to one field so a description fix doesn’t touch prices. Run it on a handful of products first. And watch what happens to your barcodes and IDs, since protecting those is half the reason to get off spreadsheets to begin with.
Spreadsheet mistakes don’t usually announce themselves. More often a customer finds them first. Past a certain size, editing products directly in your store and checking each change before it goes out is just less risky. Try the Scrub Search & Replace app today for your Shopify or BigCommerce product data management needs.
